


albatrosses

by ckaster



Series: fantasy high outtakes [2]
Category: Dimension 20 (Web Series)
Genre: Bill Seacaster's funeral, Canon Compliant, Grief/Mourning, M/M, the gay is vv light but still there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-17
Updated: 2019-11-17
Packaged: 2021-02-08 03:36:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21469414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ckaster/pseuds/ckaster
Summary: "Even from this distance Riz is perceptive enough to tell that Fabian’s quiet, too, not even generating the ambient spew of white noise bullshit he always seems to produce whenever nobody else is saying anything, and it seems like—"It seems private. And Riz understands what it’s like to want something to be private, to feel like your skin is the only thing holding your bones together and to want nobody else to see how fucked up and broken you are on the inside, so."Or: a funeral, and all the things that come with it.
Relationships: Riz Gukgak/Fabian Aramais Seacaster
Series: fantasy high outtakes [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1549888
Comments: 10
Kudos: 156





	albatrosses

**Author's Note:**

> thanks avi for the beta!

After the funeral is over, the officiate staring up in horror at the church’s sudden lack of roof, Riz promises his mom he’ll get Fabian or the Thistlesprings to drop him off at home and watches her speed off in the cruiser, lights already on and siren whooping, and wanders into Cravencroft proper, feet soft on the grass. 

The sun had started to set as the ceremony had progressed, and now it bathes everything in an orange light, pitches the gravestones set against the hill into stark shadow. It also illuminates the newest memorial in Cravencroft: Bill Seacaster’s mausoleum, a giant chunk of marble expertly carved to resemble the bow of the  _ Hangman  _ in her glory days cleaving a wave in two, a paper-thin jib attached to a mast extending at a severe angle into the woods at the edge of the cemetery. Only part of his ashes are being entombed within; the rest are supposed to be spread at sea, or so Riz has heard. Fabian said something about heading for the coast immediately, but who knows when that’ll happen, really.

Riz stands at his own father’s grave and tries desperately not to think, and for a moment it works, hyper-focused as he is on the barely-visible carved letters reading POK GUKGAK as the setting sun hits the headstone from the back. The shadow of it, stark and immutable, falls over the half-dead grass that covers, as Riz understands it now, an empty grave, nothing left but a crystal and a photo and a gun. 

In comparison to Bill Seacaster’s absurd memorial, his father’s headstone is tiny, the legacy of one goblin who’d died shrouded in secrecy massively outclassed by Bill Seacaster, the greatest pirate who’d ever lived and died: the engraved  _ In Memory of a Father and a Husband  _ a pathetic match for the tomes and scrolls filled with Bill Seacaster’s exploits apparently laid alongside the man’s ashes. 

Maybe somewhere there’s some sort of record of what his dad did, what his missions entailed. Riz will have to take a closer look at his files when he gets home, if he’s got the time. 

With that in mind he rubs a thumb over the curve of the headstone, adjusts the way the bandolier hangs off of it, and turns to go, resigning himself to a long walk home in the growing dark and another broken promise to his mom. Riz is pretty sure Gorgug is gone already, since he’s got another date with Zelda, even though the timing is objectively terrible, and Fabian is probably already ripping home—but halfway through his musings about Fabian sitting astride the Hangman he draws up short, because there, standing face-to-face with the carved _Hangman_’s figurehead, is someone Riz would recognize anywhere. 

Even from this distance Riz is perceptive enough to tell that Fabian’s quiet, too, not even generating the ambient spew of white noise bullshit he always seems to produce whenever nobody else is saying anything, and it seems like—

It seems private. And Riz understands what it’s like to want something to be private, to feel like your skin is the only thing holding your bones together and to want nobody else to see how fucked up and broken you are on the inside, so.

Riz takes a deep breath and the long way around, following the path over and around the backside of the hill, but it still doubles back towards Bill Seacaster’s mausoleum; something about the placement of it suggests it was intentionally put there at the path marking the beginning of the cemetery, to force people to look at it. Riz keeps his head down as Fabian comes into view, trying to make it seem as though he’s failed to notice Fabian entirely; usually he’d just sneak around since his stealth bonus is huge, but there’s no real cover unless Riz wants to go into the woods, and while he likes Zayn well enough Riz isn’t much a fan of ghosts after the whole arcade thing, and—well. Cravencroft is mundane enough, but it does have a reputation, and Riz didn’t get this far without being just a  _ little  _ bit paranoid.

Riz’s investigation bonus is also absurd, so there’s no way he  _ wouldn’t _ have spotted Fabian, but he figures it’s a small courtesy to let someone even as effusive as Fabian to grieve in silence, at least for a while. 

As Riz passes, though, Fabian’s head turns towards him, ever so slightly; Riz suspects he’s hearing Riz more than seeing him, since this is the side with his bad eye, the remaining sunlight catching against the pure golden thread embroidering the black leather patch that covers it, turning it reddish-orange. 

“The Ball,” Fabian says in half-hearted greeting, and his voice is thick, like he’s been crying. 

“Hey, Fabian,” Riz says, drawing out the  _ y  _ in  _ hey _ — _ heyyyy _ —trying to inject as much surprise into his voice as possible, and for a half-second he wishes he’d taken expertise in deception, because that was pathetic. “Uh, funny seeing—seeing you here.” 

Oh, fuck Riz’s  _ entire life _ , unintentional sight puns. If whatever god happens to be watching could smite Riz on the spot, that would be—that would be more than awesome. That would be fantastic, actually. 

Fabian doesn’t react, though, and this close Riz can see the box Fabian is holding, knuckles going a little white from how hard he’s gripping it. It’s maybe six inches long, a wooden chest with gold gilding around the hinges, filigree in the shape of waves that seem to crest and fold over each other the longer Riz stares at it. The rest of Bill Seacaster’s ashes, Riz guesses, and marvels slightly at the structural integrity of the box, that Fabian hasn’t managed to splinter it already. 

“Yeah,” Fabian says, after a long moment, and sniffs loudly. If Riz was Kristen, maybe, or Fig, he’d probably loudly ask Fabian if he’d been crying, but mocking people’s grief, no matter how unexpected it is, seems like a dick move, and Riz regularly feels like an asswad enough already. 

Riz shifts his weight in his slightly too-tight shoes, looking down at his hands where they’re holding the briefcase of infinite holding, his insight into Fabian not enough to tell him what the right course of action is. In the orange light drenching the cemetery, the scar tissue lacing his hands from his journey through the palimpsest stands out against his skin more than it normally does, faint lines crossing his knuckles and slicing up his wrists. 

“I’m sorry,” Riz says, looking up after a long second, because no matter how many years had passed between their fathersʼ deaths, or the massive chasm separating everything that Riz is from everything that Fabian is, death is death, and there’s not a lot that can be done about that after the saves have been rolled. 

Fabian just shakes his head, sniffs harder. 

“It’s  _ fine, _ ” Fabian says, and Riz doesn’t need insightful fighting to know what he says is a crock of bullshit. Fabian is not fine, and Riz would venture to guess that no matter how good of a show Fabian puts on, he’s doing just as badly as the rest of them, ‘Bad Kids’ not referring so much to their propensity for detentions but for the way they’re all a little fucked up in ways they can’t always hide. “It’s fine.” 

“Okay,” Riz says, instead of calling Fabian on it. There’s no real reason to. Not really. 

There’s a long moment of quiet.

“I killed him,” Fabian says abruptly. Riz can see how locked-tight his arms and shoulders are, like he’s expecting someone to yell at him, to call him a coward for crying. Riz has never really thought Fabian was a coward, even when he ran away in the middle of a fight and, afterwards, tried to bullshit his way through saying it wasn’t that he failed saving throw after saving throw, it was just—something. There was always something. 

Riz doesn’t think Fabian’s a coward. He thinks Fabian is a little afraid sometimes, but, looking at the bigger picture, it’s not a problem, comparatively speaking. Riz is a little afraid all the time, except for when he’s focusing too hard to realize things are going on around him, and then he’s just an idiot, which is not related to this at all.

Riz takes a deep breath, refocuses. “I’m sorry,” he repeats, and it sounds stupid, but it’s all he can muster. 

Fabian killed his father. 

Riz barely even knew his. 

If Riz dwells on this, he will forgive neither himself nor Fabian, which means it gets shoved into the box in the back of his mind labeled  _ Toxic, Do Not Open.  _

“I’m not,” Fabian says, and his voice sounds like it has conviction, but the way he’s looking at everything but the box in his hands and Riz and the tomb right in front of him says otherwise, and Riz suspects Fabian’s doing the thing again where he says one thing and means another thing entirely, like if he says it with enough force it’ll suddenly become the truth. “I’m not sorry. It’s what he wanted.” 

The Sword of the Seacasters glints at Fabian’s side, the crude belt looping around Fabian’s waist at odds with the regal elegance of stark black elven suit he’s wearing; the jacket that barely contains the breadth of Fabian’s shoulders probably costs more than anything Riz has ever owned besides maybe his father’s gun and the briefcase Fabian gave him. In the last of the light the gorgeously-cut ruby embedded at its golden hilt seems to wink, and then go dark. 

Riz feels, suddenly, spectacularly useless again. Investigators can only solve crime after it’s been committed, and even then there are things that are impossible to puzzle out with cold logic and a red string, too messy for a stack of folders. There is something oppressive about how lost Riz feels, how massively ill equipped he is for confronting his own emotions, let alone Fabian’s; in the cemetery, the silence only broken by Fabian’s stifled sniffles and the occasional caw of a raven, it only grows worse. 

There’s some things nobody can completely fix, like a bullet shot into a wall: no matter how many surveillance photos and papers cover the wall over the drywall patch, there’s always going to be a bullet hole under all of that, always going to be more and more tiny holes where thumbtacks were pushed into the wall over and over, trying to use distraction as a way to stop the invasive knowledge that there will always be somewhere in the wall where there was a fucking bullet, and there’s no way to solve that, not really.

“Could you do me a favor?” Fabian asks, and his voice is so small it seems like it’s swallowed up by the sculpted sea the marble  _ Hangman  _ is parting, barely audible even to Riz’s ears. Without turning or looking at him Fabian holds out the box of Bill Seacaster’s ashes in Riz’s direction. “Put it in your briefcase or something, I don’t care. I don’t want to see it.” 

Riz gets it. He’d spent three hours sitting in front of the false door to his father’s secret office, hating himself for not going in but not being able to look away and hurting too bad to move, so he slides the box into the briefcase of infinite holding without saying anything. It doesn’t get heavier, but the weight of what Riz has been asked to do, to hold on to someone else’s memory, settles across Riz’s shoulders. It’s not so different from the weight that’s already there, but he watches Fabian’s shoulders relax just the slightest, and wonders if he’s relieved some of Fabian’s burden. 

Wonders, for a fleeting second, if his own could be shared, and then shuts that thought down hard. 

No matter what revelations may have come recently, Riz’s wound is an old one, and he’s already put in too much effort patching over that section of drywall to go swinging sledgehammers around now. 

“Did you need a ride home?” Fabian says, the phrase only half a question as he finally looks over at Riz; Riz’s traitor heart skips at meeting Fabian’s eyes, because he’s an  _ idiot _ . “I saw Sklonda left.” 

“I was just going to walk,” Riz says, answering a question Fabian hasn’t asked yet, “or take the bus, or something.”

Fabian makes a sound that would probably be a snort if his nose had not been, Riz thinks, stuffed up, and despite how awful the sound is, Riz decides against rummaging around in his briefcase for the pack of tissues he knows he shoved in there at some point. “Hangman,” he calls, and the word is painfully raw coming out of his mouth; Riz spots the faint wince that passes over his face, which means Fabian noticed it too, and hated it enough to show it. “You’re coming with me, the Ball.” 

The bike comes ripping up a moment later, headlight sweeping over them as it skids to a halt outside the gates of Cravencroft. Riz trails after Fabian without a fight, suddenly too tired to argue, and straddles the bike behind Fabian, curls his arms around the bottom of Fabian’s ribs as Fabian kicks the bike into gear and—

Doesn’t move. 

Riz glances up and Fabian is just—frozen, not doing anything. For a moment Riz thinks this is magic or something, the absolute stillness so dramatically at odds with Fabian’s usual dynamism, but he can feel the tight rise and fall of Fabian’s ribs, a little panicked, like if he moves even an inch he’s going to break down, apart, shatter into a billion tiny pieces. 

Riz curls his arms a little tighter than is strictly necessary around Fabian’s body, tries not to feel like he’s holding Fabian together. 

“If we go this slow I might have to just get off and start walking,” Riz says, and feels it the moment Fabian half-chuckles, a vibration Riz can feel through his entire body, like relief. 

Fabian finally moves, just his arm, and for a moment Riz could swear there was a ghost of heat over where his hands are laced around Fabian’s ridiculous abs, like Fabian held his hand over Riz’s, but just as soon as it’s there it’s gone again, and Riz has no idea whether he’s imagining things or not. 

He thinks about asking, even opens his mouth, but closes it after a moment, presses his forehead against Fabian’s shoulderblades, breathes in the scent of dry cleaner and gasoline and boy, and refuses to let his traitor mouth get away from him, refuses to do anything other than hang on.

Under his forehead Fabian exhales sharply and revs the engine.

“Let’s get the Ball home,” Fabian tells the Hangman, and with an obliging rumble, the motorcycle roars into the darkness, bearing them both away from Cravencroft and all the things that are too hard to think about alone. 

**Author's Note:**

> this is the first time i've written fic in two years and also the first time writing for this fandom. let me know how i did? 
> 
> (in other news, i need to stop referencing the rime of the ancient mariner every chance i get, but gimme a pirate's son and suddenly i have no idea what to do with myself except compulsively make references to a two hundred year old poem)


End file.
